And more than 1 year after 0.96.0 : raine 0.97.0 !!!

[Tux]

And what took me so long ? Finding something to use for the sh2 emulation in 64 bits, and it was not easy !

Finally I took the sh2 emulation from an old mame version (153), and modified it to be compatible with what gens did, so that it's compatible with the psikyosh driver. The result is slightly slower than the asm version, but not by a lot, so it will do for now. I lost a lot of time with yabause which I looked at before that.

Except that the windows status bugs seem fixed for good for those who missed the latest update of this painful story in the forum, there was a binary specific for that.

And you can update your dlls for 0.96 if you want a more recent sdl2 version, but it's not mandatory, it should work fine with the old dlls.

Have fun : http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

Oh yeah, I also added some links to some strategy guides in the about dialog for galaxian, pacman & clones, and dodonpachi. It's nothing fancy, it will just open your current browser with the corresponding page in the web, some kind of integrated bookmarks to raine, but I thought these guides deserved some more visibility !

[_MADrigal]

A new version of RAINE is always very welcome!

What is the major effect of the updated sh2 emulation? Are there new games supported by RAINE, or does this change improves the general quality of emulation to the previously available games?

[Tux]

16 minutes ago, _MADrigal said:

A new version of RAINE is always very welcome!

What is the major effect of the updated sh2 emulation? Are there new games supported by RAINE, or does this change improves the general quality of emulation to the previously available games?

Previously the sh2 emulation worked only in 32 bits, the asm version, using the gens sh2 emulation, so all the psikyosh games were usable only in 32 bits. I'll add some driver selection for Psikyo SH2 in the game selection dialog to be able to list them more easily next time.

This includes :

 - Gunbarich
 - Gunbird 2
 - Sol Divide
 - Strikers 1945 II and III
 - Tetris the absolute grandmaster 2, and 2 plus.

These games are the biggest and the most modern ones in raine, all using 24 bits colors.

I just noticed that I released a little too fast and sol divide and Stikers 1945 II don't work well in this version, I'll probably release a fix later today.

This was something which bothered me for long actually ! For info the ultimate motivation to finish this came from a news in slashdot about some avx512 optimization in assembler by ffmpeg : https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/2140206/ffmpeg-devs-boast-of-up-to-94x-performance-boost-after-implementing-handwritten-avx-512-assembly-code

up to 94x acceleration, and for hand written assembler you don't see that everyday particularly these days, and some comments doubt it's possible since recent compilers include options to use avx, avx2 or avx512 to optimize, you can do it even with raine, the binary is slightly faster, but since it's slightly only it's not enough to justify another binary. But raine shows very well how the compilers improved in the last 20 years : the 32 bits assembler version includes crazily optimized assembler code for the video part, and nowdays the 64 bits version is almost as fast, and this version uses only C, relying entierly on the compiler to optimize ! This is really impressive. So I became really curious to see what a compiler could do with some C sh2 emulation... !
Actually it's still a lilttle slower than the assembler version and it would require some more work to be at a similar level of speed, but it's already quite good.

[_MADrigal]

Aha I sure remember the day you differentiated the 32 and 64 bit by adding the sh2 emulation to one and not the other. I just didn't realise this release was about extending the sh2 emulation to the 64 bit build.

I will make sure to post about this new release on the Zzap!Raine Facebook page when the fix is available. Thanks for the excellent work!

L.

[pmc2]

thank you, and if you'd like to do a changelog one day soon so that we can relay this properly, that would be great

[mer-curious]

Hello Tux! Thank you so much for this new release. I hope more users can also benefit from the fixes to the window status, and from the other changes too.

Here I have a quick and short feedback for this version:

- the issue with the default sound output device detection is still present in this version unfortunately (and in version 0.97.1 as well). Raine can't detect the sound device which is currently used in desktop. Also, the sound device setting is not saved and restored if we change it and reopen the program after properly quitting it. Perhaps this could be fixed too...?

But I think the most important improvement would be to detect the sound device set in desktop when the program is opened and use it as default, because this is what happens with most emulators, so users are not used to configuring that. I think this would let Raine more user-friendly, especially when using it for the first time.

Anyway, hopefully you'll be able to test this in a Windows device and finally see what is going on with it.

Thank you so much again for your work.

PS: there are some very cheap USB sound cards available in the market which could be possibly used to reproduce this issue (see here: https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-usb-sound-card.html). But I don't think it is worth it getting one just for this test, unless you know someone who could lend it to you...

Edited Monday at 02:08 AM by mer-curious

[Tux]

1 hour ago, mer-curious said:

Hello Tux! Thank you so much for this new release. I hope more users can also benefit from the fixes to the window status, and from the other changes too.

Here I have a quick and short feedback for this version:

- the issue with the default sound output device detection is still present in this version unfortunately (and in version 0.97.1 as well). Raine can't detect the sound device which is currently used in desktop. Also, the sound device setting is not saved and restored if we change it and reopen the program after properly quitting it. Perhaps this could be fixed too...?

But I think the most important improvement would be to detect the sound device set in desktop when the program is opened and use it as default, because this is what happens with most emulators, so users are not used to configuring that. I think this would let Raine more user-friendly, especially when using it for the first time.

Anyway, hopefully you'll be able to test this in a Windows device and finally see what is going on with it.

Thank you so much again for your work.

PS: there are some very cheap USB sound cards available in the market which could be possibly used to reproduce this issue (see here: https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-usb-sound-card.html). But I don't think it is worth it getting one just for this test, unless you know someone who could lend it to you...

Non issue, already talked about it.

And no sorry, already said but I can't detect your desktop sound setting (and really don't care).

I tested that quickly in the mini with its 2 soundcards and selecting the 2nd soundcard was saved when quiting normally using the quit command. You can check it in the config file in [Sound] section, sound_card is just a number, 1 for the 1st sound card, 2 for the 2nd, and so on.

edit : and in windows too of course, I plugged this usb soundcard which became the 1st soundcard in windows for god know which reason but anyway at this point I could change or keep the soundcard in raine and it was saved all the time. End of the problem for me.

[pmc2]

I don't want to rub it in, but Mercurious is right, the default audio device is never the right one (that's how I discovered I had an HP in my screen, thanks for that^^), it's been like that for a few releases now. On the other hand, it saves once I change it (but I'll retest on the latest version to be sure). I don't know how it's done in Windows, why it wasn't like this until a few versions ago and since then it's changed. Is defect 0 the output of my screen instead of the classic HP one, I don't know. It's not important to me but something happened either in windows or in raine.

Edited Monday at 01:58 PM by pmc2

[Tux]

48 minutes ago, pmc2 said:

I don't want to rub it in, but Mercurious is right, the default audio device is never the right one (that's how I discovered I had an HP in my screen, thanks for that^^), it's been like that for a few releases now. On the other hand, it saves once I change it (but I'll retest on the latest version to be sure). I don't know how it's done in Windows, why it wasn't like this until a few versions ago and since then it's changed. Is defect 0 the output of my screen instead of the classic HP one, I don't know. It's not important to me but something happened either in windows or in raine.

No idea, but as you said, it's not important as long as the setting is properly saved and restored since it takes just a few seconds to setup that. Tested with the latest version, and it is, so that's all that matters for now, if someone wants to investigate further, he's welcome to !

for your change, I changed the way the soundcard is 1st selected in 0.97, I let sdl2 choose instead of always selecting the 1st one, but I don't know how it chooses ! It was discussed in another thread, started by mer-curious too. Notice that if you preserve your config file and always unpack a new version in the same dir, you won't notice this change.